Facile Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles Useful for Fabrication of ...

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We report here a facile synthesis of stabilized silver nanoparticles with a particle size of
Published on Web 02/18/2005

Facile Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles Useful for Fabrication of High-Conductivity Elements for Printed Electronics Yuning Li, Yiliang Wu, and Beng S. Ong* Materials Design and Integration Laboratory, Xerox Research Centre of Canada, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5K 2L1 Received October 30, 2004; E-mail: [email protected]

Printed transistor circuits using liquid-based printing techniques for patterning and deposition are of great interest1-5 as they represent potentially low-cost alternatives to amorphous silicon technologies for electronics. Potential applications for these circuits are diverse, ranging from large-area electronics (e.g., active-matrix LCDs, organic light emitting diodes, e-paper), where fast switching speeds are not essential, to low-end devices (e.g., wearable electronics, smart labels, radio frequency identification tags), where mechanical flexibility is required or where high cost of silicon chip packaging becomes prohibitive. While great strides have recently been achieved in designing liquid processable semiconductors for printed electronics, little progress has been made in printable conductive materials, despite their importance as electrodes, pixel pads, conductive lines, and tracks in enabling low-cost electronics. Earlier work on printable conductors focused on organic materials, such as polyaniline6 and PEDOT/PSS.5b,7 These are very lowconductivity materials (200 °C.10 Recently, conductive elements have been generated from silver nanoparticles, albeit at high annealing temperatures (>300 °C).11 Since the melting points of metal particles drop drastically in the extreme nanometer regime (